Everyone has their own unique story for going through the process. For example, someone close to me believed they were F2M, and mid-transition, learned instead that they actually liked to express themselves as feminine but wanted some features granted by the hormones they took. Once they got what they wanted, they stopped taking hormones. I’m not sure that’s the same as a “detransition”, but it answered a lot of questions this person had and ended up helping them with their body dysmorphia (which was what the goal was in the first place - not necessarily to fully transition, but to address their discomfort with their own body).
In this case, it seems like this person did fully transition, but they were unable to adapt at first to the transition (largely due to their environment). I’d imagine this kind of story isn’t super uncommon for people in environments that won’t accept them transitioning, where they feel the need to change themselves back to satisfy society until they can either accept that their environment will reject them, or find an environment that will accept them.
Wow, that article resonated with me in ways I will need time to process…
Lol they want you to be outraged that someone might change their mind but ppl change their mind all the time e.g. divorce so trying to pass it as a trans issue is a thinly veiled gaslight
It seemed to me like they perceived that some people to be outraged by people who change their mind and were advocating that all decisions should be safe.
To transition and then change one’s mind about it was an unspeakable, disgusting fate, almost no matter whom you asked. That didn’t exactly make gender exploration any easier. I contemplated transition for years but didn’t move forward, because I so deeply feared getting it wrong. And then once I started, I was terrified of how it might look for me to turn back.
That is not wanting people outraged, that is being afraid of outrage. They didn’t even say the outrage was specifically a trans issue, because it also came from TERFs or whoever. And I don’t think they mentioned it, but it plays right into right wing narratives even if fully detransitioning isn’t what they wanted either.
We’re largely in agreement. Read my comment and replace ”they" with anti-trans rights folk
That makes much more sense. :)
I’m not sure I follow what you’re saying. Could you rephrase?
If I am reading correctly, they are just pointing out that people regret all kinds of decisions that have lasting impact on life. To try to say that trans people in particular need to be “protected” from transition because of possible regret is acting as though that regret is uniquely bad, which isn’t the case. Hence why it would be gaslighting.
Ah yea, I thought the author did a great job touching on that
Yes thanks that’s what I was saying
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Great seeing exploration to be encouraged. Fear of being “ammunition” for transphobes has definitely been something that’s held me back. I don’t know have any solid gender identity and don’t think I want one. Finally decided to try out HRT and I’m grateful for the existence of informed consent. Still not sure what my goals are or if its a good decision, but I think I’d rather find out by giving it a try and think it will be a valuable experiment regardless of the outcome. I intended to come out to a few more people before starting HRT, but was never sure what I’d be coming out as and didn’t want to get put into narrower boxes based on whatever that was. Guess now I can come out as someone taking HRT?
Wish we could be at the point where things HRT and other surgeries currently labeled “gender-affirming care” were considered more like getting a tattoo or other cosmetic surgeries respectively such it was more normalized and more people, cis or trans, could have access to them if they want. Why should someone have to figure out something as nebulas as gender to know what sort of body they want?
I really wish for a day when exploring one’s gender and sexuality isn’t seen as aberrant or deviant or “sinful”. People need to feel comfortable to find out what’s right for them, who they are, without judgement. We see so much bullshit scaremongering about detransitioning as though it validates the fact that being trans isn’t real, and that’s not the case. Someone exploring, trying a change, and realizing that’s not the right thing is fine! Of course what isn’t fine is how many people detransition due to social pressure. If your entire family disowns you, you lose your job, etc., then that’s really fucking hard to bear, and no one should have to go through that.
Can’t get this article out of my head.
I don’t feel exactly the same, and I don’t exactly want to detranstion but my own understanding of who I am and what I’m comfortable performing or not always changes.
I am more comfortable with a mostly feminine body than not, and I definitely don’t regret SRS, but I also have no intention of voice training, I don’t really do makeup or overly feminine clothing. I like maintaining some muscles, sometimes I wish I could go on T for a bit to body build and experience the mental changes now they wouldn’t be an inescapable prison but also I strongly don’t want some physical changes like hair growth.
Life is weird, gender is strange, people want to put people in boxes so much even non binary labels have aesthetics in the public eye, and expected roles to perform.
Right? My physical dysphoria was addressed by a very traditionally binary medical transition…
But that feeling of transitioning to escape the confines of gender, only to find out that there’s just more gender? I feel that in my bones… Masculinity, femininity, they both feel alien to me, and in transitioning, I feel like I’ve escaped one gender box only to land in another (admittedly more comfortable) gender box. I don’t want a better box. I want no box! And this article vocalised and crystallised a lot of my own half formed thoughts
And the idea of finding comfort in always struggling with the boxes?
“but for me, being trans is all about feeling uncomfortable with any category, and with the action of breaking away again and again and again. It’s the disavowal, not the desire.”
This spoke to me in ways that I’d never considered before, but yeah, that’s me…
Yeah, it’s difficult to process. I certainly wouldn’t be the first woman to reject traditional femininity, or even to take T for various goals if I did that; it’s hard to understand how much of the distance and alienation I feel is internalised transphobia, a result of a different socialisation (would a cis woman, raised as a cis man, feel the same way?), a defensive reaction to treatment from society at large, or some “genuine” need to understand myself in contrast to traditional structures. Is such a question even meaningful? the author’s stance is no, and I think I agree?
I remember saying at some point to a therapist early in the process, when she asked what I thought transition would look like, that I didn’t want to go through all the pain and rejection of tearing off one mask only to put on another but of course now I understand that such a thing isn’t really possible.
I think a lot of people would say “Ok, you’re describing the experience of being non binary” but I don’t think it’s quite that, particularly internally I tend to feel quite strongly gendered, something odd happened where prior to transition I was mostly a woman in my imagination/internal monologue and after transition I often find myself thinking of myself as a man. Yet when I’m gendered as a man by strangers it feels awful!
Even discussing this stuff is difficult, because it’ll all be used as ammunition by people to attack trans people.
Amusingly I think the most seen I’ve ever felt by a stranger was when a guy a bit divorced from reality (drugs or psychosis I don’t know, never saw him again) looked up and went “ah, another androgynous soul” and then went back to his ravings.
I think a lot of people would say “Ok, you’re describing the experience of being non binary” but I don’t think it’s quite that, particularly internally I tend to feel quite strongly gendered, something odd happened where prior to transition I was mostly a woman in my imagination/internal monologue and after transition I often find myself thinking of myself as a man. Yet when I’m gendered as a man by strangers it feels awful!
Yes, this is similar to my own experience! It feels like what I’m experiencing should be a non binary experience, yet, I don’t resonate with that, because my internal identity is gendered in a binary way. Yet every time I’m seen as transgressing gendered norms, it makes me happy. That was true before I transitioned, and it remains true now that the norms attached to me are different. I’m not happy being misgendered, but I’m quite happy to not be gendered, and I’m uncomfortable when people assume I’m cishet. I’d be happiest if my gender was an internal experience and of no importance to anyone else. My gender identity is there, and it’s pretty binary I guess, yet that very same binary comes with a boatload of bullshit that no one should have to deal with.
Wow, I feel really seen by the essay and also by the comments by both of you ♥
Because of the author’s book “unmasking autism” I first discovered the labels autigender/neuroqueer. Those helped me a lot to see my gender doubts and internal conflicts as being the products of me as an autistic person trying to assimilate into a gendered society.
Before seriously questioning whether I was cis or not, I specifically looked up autism gender because I’ve long thought I’m too autistic for gender. But since I don’t have an official diagnosis, I never considered using the autigender label and just didn’t think about that for a while longer. I always found it a bit strange that other autistic people could be binary trans because of my own disconnect from gender. Allistic cis people caring about gender was always weird too, but like. They’re allistic. They’re gonna be weird. Why would autistic people go out of their way to embrace the charade of gender? At least teenage me still didn’t use my confusion as a reason to be transphobic.
Hahaha so true! Although I get that autistic people could go either way, either be completely confused by gender and then abandon it as much as possible. Or on the other extreme autistic people might also try to learn all the rules of gender and get it just right?
I identify as non-binary and agender. In ways I resonate a lot with what Devon and you all have written in this thread, but figured I’d share a few words about my own experience. The closest thing I’ve found to gender euphoria (I don’t experience gender-specific feelings but this describes a positive experience that involves gender expression and the perception of gender by others) comes through the lens of transgressing gendered norms. In particular, I get a lot of delight out of causing confusion in others and making people reconsider what they think they know about gender. For example, one time at a party a person used she/her to refer to me and I simply replied “I’m not a girl”. Their response was to apologize and use he/him on me, to which I replied “I’m not a boy”. This poor confused soul then asked “well what are you then?” to which I replied in as upbeat and cute as I could muster “I’m a bunny!” I truly wish I had my phone at the ready to record the very visible thought process on this poor lad’s face as my words both disarmed and confused him. It is one of my most cherished memories.
I enjoy the experience of being difficult to put into boxes and there is no strong compelling force for me to align with all the gender expectations of the gender I’m presenting as. In fact, I often find myself adapting how I act as a direct response to how I am perceived. For example I tend to move my vocal inflection in the opposite direction of perception - upwards if people are reading me as a man and downwards if they’re reading me as a woman not because I want to fit into a third box but because I want people to question where the box starts and ends. Liberation from the boxes that we are placed in brings me joy, and I think it’s perfectly reasonable for anyone to lay claim to an identity as a gender non-conforming binary gendered person, or even have an internal identity that’s a reflection of the external perception and pressures that brings.
Tagging @[email protected] and @[email protected] because they might also like to see this
Even in nonbinary gender, there’s expectations and they’re horrible. I’m openly dronegender on this account. And people call me a transphobic troll for it, because they say being trans is only two genders, only the respectable genders. It’s why I’m really afraid of being doxxed. I don’t want to face this kind of stigma and discrimination all the time. I want the option of staying in the closet some of the time. Unfortunately, some people on Lemmy have tried to “expose” me by accusing me of being various other people. Thankfully, they’ve been wrong every time so far. But I worry one day they’re going to get it right, and I’m going to suffer. And I’ve seen the people who are accused of being me having to erase their entire digital presence to get away from the violence. That sort of thing was really common on Blahaj Zone, and I resent those who allowed it to happen.
cw for slurs :l
I work for an academic medical center that’s fairly well known both locally and in the world. However, we haven’t been known for stellar queer health. In fact, I’d say we’ve been lacking, quite a bit. Recently the school put on a talk about the medical needs of people who have detransitioned and even featured a speaker who had themselves detransitioned. It was an absolutely fascinating talk, which highlighted some of the trends they have been seeing, talked about the many reasons that people tend to detransition (mostly social pressures, as described by Devon in the piece) and talked rather frankly about the kind of online harassment these individuals had experienced for detransitioning. It was really sad to hear about the harassment, although unfortunately not something that surprised me.
Having been in plenty of online trans spaces, it’s been clear to me that there are a lot of people out there struggling and many of them can lash out at others for plenty of extremely valid reasons. Being trans means you’re constantly under attack - people invalidate your experience which prompts defense, but perhaps more importantly one often has to fight tooth and nail and expend significant resources in order to get access to medical care which in many cases can be life saving. People often convince themselves that access is more prevalent if they fall into certain boxes. Trans medicalism is one such example, a viewpoint in which advocates distill transgenderism into a very medical definition. It’s entirely an issue of nature, with no nurture component, and it has well defined symptoms and resolutions. Trans medicalism is almost always purely binary and assumes there is an “ideal” endpoint of transitioning. What this often means, is that trans medicalists will attack people who don’t agree with their viewpoint and make the argument that promoting any other viewpoint or life experiences will result in jeopardizing their access to already limited medical care.
Trans medicalists causing infighting in the transgender field is just one such example from these trans spaces where infighting (and outsiders attacking) happens and there’s some level of harassment. Luckily there’s a lot of folks who will back you up if you are attacked by these folks who are often deeply scared and hurting, but there’s a lot less support for folks who talk about detransitioning. Detransitioning highlights the fact that there are folks who will undergo some level of transitioning and regret it and reverse course. This makes the idea of transitioning scary to cis folks, and it also gives them a reason to gatekeep it, at least until adulthood, an idea which can be catastrophic given the high suicide rates of trans folks, especially those who are young and watching their body change in ways which cause serious distress. However, the literature reveals that the vast majority of folks who do detransition do so because of social pressures (averaging around 80% of the primary reason and >90% of folks citing it as at least one of the reasons) which reinforces the narrative that social acceptance of trans folks is the most important factor to their success. Regardless, the perceived invalidation of transness (that some people could choose to reverse course) means that folks who try and talk about their experience of detransitioning often get attacked online.
It would be difficult to talk about the harassment that detransitioning folks get online without also addressing that there’s a weirdly large number of people making up personas online as a way to push their political agenda. Having moderated transgender spaces online, I have personally witnessed individuals who come back, time and time again, and spread a false story about detransitioning. I say that it’s a false story because some of these individuals have been discovered to post elsewhere on the internet about the this behavior and celebrating the fact that they are sowing discord. In fact, this happens so often, that in many trans spaces I’ve been in online, they either explicitly ban or more discreetly clean up this kind of noise, likely catching some folks who truly did transition and were not indulging a false persona online.
This was the first time I had even spotted an academic talk on detransitioning and it really signaled to me the beginning of acceptance and the emergence of a group from the shadows where they have been shoved, and to stumble across an article like this from a well known semi-public trans figure was really amazing for me to see. A lot of the narratives that Devon brought forth in this post highlight a lot of the struggles that trans folks deal with and puts words to some of the tough ideas we’ll need to struggle with as a society and as an in-group (a call to action for trans folks to more vocally/actively support detransitioning). It also highlights some more non-traditional paths and viewpoints on gender. As someone who is both non-binary and agender, I personally resonated with a lot that Devon brings to the table here. I don’t often talk very vocally about my own experience because I’ve both experienced and worry about the push back that narratives like mine and Devon’s can garner. For example, being agender, I don’t experience gender based feelings - gender dysphoria and euphoria are both things I do not experience. Many people might question why I decided to transition in the first place, and my answer might also be wholly unconvincing to many.
I suspect this subset of individuals is going to be thrust into the limelight (they already have, at times, by journalism and political forces) more presently, especially as we begin to better address their health needs. Mental health, especially given the amount of harassment they receive or the need to conceal their detransitioning, seems to be especially prescient. I’m glad that we have some figures such as Devon speaking out about their experience, and helping to draw attention to all the nuances that go into one’s decision to transition and how the experience itself can be a lot messier than the media makes it out to be.
